shiny things in messy little piles

Tag: siphonophores

Morning Linkage (Jul 27)

Transportation

So much train awe­some­ness — pages and pages. Some high­lights… retro-futuristic designs, and mod­ern reuse of old­er engines. Oh, and the pigs let­ting them­selves off at the station.

Anoth­er xs650 bob­ber. Sub­tle details in the body work. Close to perfection.

Rid­den in the dirt. Nuff said.

Science

Fried egg jel­ly­fish. The bane of my child­hood. But pret­ty dan­ged cool when giv­en the Creature-cast treatment.

Remem­ber the siphonophores from a while back? Did you know that they fig­ured in naval war­fare. Hid­ing a sub­ma­rine beneath a raft of crea­tures that sonar can’t see but can’t see through.

Art, Images, and Design

This year’s rice pad­dy art from Japan. Amaz­ing what you can do with a lit­tle plan­ning and some vari­eties of rice.

It ain’t for noth­ing that I’m known as Mizz. Shoes. This Jere­my Scott design stopped me dead in my tracks.

MOMA mul­ti­me­dia pre­sen­ta­tion for “Matisse: The Rad­i­cal Inven­tion 1913–1917″ Pic­tures and com­men­tary for most of the paint­ings and draw­ings in the exhibit.

More from Yuko. The illus­tra­tions from The Beau­ti­ful and the Grotesque are enough to make you buy the book. The jack­et back blurb will clinch the deal.

now go do some­thing wonderful

Morning Linkage (Mar 9)

Transportation

I love the tail treat­ment on this Tri­umph. Such a sweet, round butt.

The post title says it all “Enjoy Some Gra­tu­itous Clas­sic Lotus Porn.” Pics from the Lotus archives. (SFW)

A bad jump start once cost me a ECU/BCU pair for a Mer­cedes. If the surge sup­pres­sor in these smart jumper cables works I’d be will­ing to pay a whole lot more than $35.

Just a note — Top­Speed has been removed from my read­er. Their refusal to include links to sources and the web­sites of orga­ni­za­tions they report on has final­ly dri­ven me over the edge. Nom­i­na­tions for good sources of motor indus­try news sought. I’d like some­thing that cov­ers cars and bikes, busi­ness, and cur­rent prod­ucts rather than vin­tage and custom.

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Science

Crea­ture Cast update.  Dr. Phil Pugh talks about the first time he got to see siphonophores from a sub­ma­rine. He had stud­ied these fas­ci­nat­ing, clone-based organ­isms for years with­out hav­ing the chance to see one intact. Mes­mer­iz­ing video too. (Audio Narration)

Huge data sets and mas­sive com­put­ing pow­er seem like they should allow sci­en­tists to find more and more sig­nif­i­cant cor­re­la­tions and depen­den­cies. The oppo­site may be true. More data and more ways of slic­ing it increas­es the chance that results are noth­ing more than ran­dom noise.

More data to play with, Google brings more data sets to Pub­lic Data Explor­er. Let’s all try to remem­ber that the plur­al of sta­tis­tics is not information.

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Art, Images, and Design

The 50’s are often con­sid­ered the gold­en age of com­mer­cial illus­tra­tion. From the time the author first noticed a hand­ful of images with the sig­na­ture Lucia to a cor­re­spon­dence with one of her col­leagues, this look at Lucia Lern­er’s career in Chica­go is a won­der­ful intro­duc­tion to this world and a rather unusu­al member.
Olaf Hajek. I don’t know what these images were made to sell but this series of five “the new secret lan­guage of sym­bols” sells me.(mildly NSFW)

Anoth­er excel­lent pho­tog­ra­ph­er with a huge Flickr stream. Batintherain is Andrea de Poda of Pesaro, Italy. A gen­tle­man with a fab­u­lous eye for architecture.

I put this here most­ly so that you can share my won­der at Cory’s descrip­tion of the hulk­ing naval(?) object in the photo.

good luck with that…